A monologue that underwent a metamorphosis … Ricardo Arjona had in front of him, on his computer screen, 90 media representatives from Spain and Latin America, including LISTÍN DIARIO. It took him a long time from a studio in Miami to tell how he got to “Blanco y negro”, his new production, consisting of two albums (“Blanco” and “Negro”, two books, a traveling photographic exhibition and a tour (when it happens coronavirus).
After about ten minutes talking, his eyes hidden behind glasses that generated brightness on distant screens searched for the question sheet that the journalists had previously sent to his production team for him to read some and answer.
In this way, the exchange with the communicators on the other side was null, practically one-way.
In his initial monologue he referred to the collaboration with his Spanish colleague Pablo Alborán, with whom he recorded organically an acoustic version of “The love that had me”, presented last week and which are part of the 14 songs of “Blanco”.
“The love he had for me,” he said, is a song “immensely Colombian” that “marks this approach of mine with Macondo in a very particular way of making an analogy between what is happening and Maconco and the solitude of the Buendías” ( family of the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, who grew up over seven generations in the fictional town of Macondo).
Arjona’s story with García Márquez is particular. She never met him, despite the fact that they lived nearby in Mexico and her great admiration for this man. “I never wanted to make contact perhaps because of the same admiration I had for him.”
Even, he said, once chased him down a road to his home in Mexico, “but I never dared, I never wanted to meet him, I refused because I wanted to leave the character intact …”.
When he unpacked everything that came to his mind about “Blanco”, from which he released the songs one by one on the streaming platforms, Arjona went on to read questions asked before the meeting and that he had written down on paper.
“It is a selfish conference,” he said jokingly to justify the formula used of no live, only written questions previously submitted.
+ The positive of the pandemic
In that first section of the two-hour connection day, the Guatemalan singer-songwriter referred to the positive effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
“One of the positive effects if one can blame this pandemic will be that it made people a little crazier because it forced in a way to improvise how to face the day, being locked forces you, among other things, to get creative” .
According to him, it is an “everyday improvisation exercise that we have all had” and in his case “submitting to the idea of having to defend song by song, which was something we had never done.”
It was there when the security within him came out and he highlights in his talk: “This album is the best defended of all those I made.”
Another of the questions sent and that he chose at random was related to him as a composer, what did he think of the Puerto Rican urban exponent? Bad Bunny (Arjona did not mention his name, it was logically intuited) he won an award as an author (which in fact, Ascap awarded him as composer of the year).
His answer: “I am not at odds with these (reggaeton) stories. I am not an enemy of reggaeton. I think that reggaeton took up space that the other genres left free. “
Then he asked: “How to defend the genres? There is the matter … The genres do not defend themselves by duetting with reggaeton.”
And he finished: “I do have something against people who belong to another genre and to get their heads out they duet with reggaeton. I don’t like that.”
– Why? “Because I think the best way to defend rock and roll is by doing rock and roll, the best way to defend the ballad is by doing ballads, better than ever, but people are trying to get afloat doing what’s hot and doing what is in fashion always generates a sort of second hand that changes absolutely nothing. “
He set an example: “The fact of making an acoustic album with sound from the 60s with all the technology in the world today is an immense contradiction but at the same time it is my way of trying to defend what I do and defend music In what I believe, the others prefer to complain or associate, I prefer to keep doing things … “.
End of the monologue. This long-awaited moment would come well into the conference. Arjona, 56, asked his assistants to open the microphones to journalists.
“Can’t we open their microphones … Do you know what it’s like to open 120 microphones now? We’re all going crazy” (laughs).
It happened. The microphones were opened at his decision. The Argentine journalist Gaby Tessio was the first chosen of numerous choices, although in the end they were few due to the number of participants and the prudent time for such activities.
The interpreter, already ready to follow live questions-answers from the Zoom platform, seemed awkward in using the computer to choose who to ask (he blamed Nicole, one of his assistants). But it was moving forward and accommodating requests. Journalists from Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala … And the Dominican Republic for when?
Arjona looked different from “the heavy”, or complicated, that he is painted many times and, on the contrary, frequently joked when choosing colleagues.
“I, for some I am a type of a certain complicated personality or much less, I think that somehow I try to create a personality that can be seen to hide many fears that are behind us all, we are all afraid in some way” , he defended himself in a moment.
+ Where the Beatles recorded
During the conversation he showed his pride in recording “Blanco” at the iconic Abbey Road studios in London, where The Beatles recorded his own.
He declared himself a sick man of the English band and did not hide his influence: “It is very difficult to find well-made popular music that does not have a passage that has gone there, it is difficult to get rid of them.”
Juan Carlos, from the newspaper Reforma, from Mexico, asks you how you feel in the world of technology we live in … What do you miss about your childhood-adolescence and what do you register now with current devices?
Arjona responds: “It gives me a kind of nostalgia to see children’s entertainment. My youngest son is ten years old and it doesn’t stop bothering me a bit that he finds fun on a tablet and not on the street, as one did. .. “.
Just on Saturday Nicolás turned 10, procreated with his wife Deisy Arvelo, who also have Ricardo Jr. The interpreter of “It was you” has another daughter, Adria, 26, the fruit of his first marriage to Leslie Torres.
+ What you can’t imagine in the future
With his family he has passed the quarantine in Miami, where he will wait for the new normality, although the future for artistic presentations remains uncertain.
“I can’t imagine a concert at a distance from people … The despair of many has generated many ideas and I am still betting a little bit on going back to what we had before, with all the consequences that may be on the way, but I don’t I imagine a concert with masks, I can not imagine a concert in which each person is two meters away from the other, “he said.
However, cracks emerge in his visualization of the future: “But I am also aware that we are going to have to adapt in some way … This is not the time to be in a hurry either.”
Then he returned with the theme: “I think that likes do not generate even 5 percent of the emotion that a live (concert) generates, it has not been achieved, so the failure of DVDs on television or live concerts” .
Then he concludes: “It is very difficult, practically impossible to condense the energy generated by a live video, so we can only wait for the world to rearrange and we adapt without haste.”
In answering a question, he touched on the topic of how new artists seek to achieve fame and money, but emphasized that his key is simple: enjoy what is done naturally.
“I think that one of the great problems of beginning artists is that some of them are too fixated on the goal much more than their work. When you start thinking about money or fame regularly, you are not going to get either one”, Held.
The subject of closer approach to Latin American socio-political realities treated in the press conference had to do with migrations to more developed countries and that in some way is reflected in the song “Mamás de Moisés”.
“If in a place of 100 people 50 decide to leave, it is because things are not working there. We have countries in Latin America that have more than four or five million people who have had to go live elsewhere. There is nothing to discuss. I do not need to study the subject. You know that something bad is being done in that place, “he said.
That people go to another country en masse is not a good sign: “Four or five million people going the other way are a convincing sign that those who are leading that country are not doing well.”
In addition to “El amor y que me me” and “Mamás Moisés”, the album “Blanco” includes the titles “El blues de la notoriedad” (produced by the Guatemalan Gaby Moreno), “Tarot”, “Hongos”, “Morir for living “,” The invisible “,” You will survive “,” Your portrait “,” She dances alone “,” Winter of glass “,” This is not the time “,” Make homeland “and” Batgirl “.
The lottery of the journalists chosen to ask continued its course until Arjona understood that he had to stop due to the amount of time that Zoom took (two hours) and with great sadness many of the colleagues were left with the microphone muted, including those who write he was left with the question asked about his conflict in the Dominican Republic with businessman Saymon Díaz And if he had any message of hope for his followers in the country, they will be waiting for him without fail when he begins his new tour in the post-coronavirus times.
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